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The reason CEOs want workers to Return To Office is because they want you to quit
(www.fastcompany.com)
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this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
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Still seems to me the idea of "if people don't come back into work the real estate market implodes" is the most convincing.
Commuters vaporizing and countless city blocks losing their purpose will cause huge upheaval in the real estate market.
And turns out a /lot/ of CEOs have a vested interest in keeping the real estate market artificially propped up.
Thus, they try and force people back to work as hard as they can.
It won't last, the big companies that don't give a shit about real estate due to being even bigger in scale will out compete and the international market will absorb most of the workforce.
If you shackle your success to real estate, then you can't compete with international megacorps that saw this coming awhile ago. Prepare to be acquired.
It's like we didn't learn pur lesson in 2008
Well, some tried to start a movement, but the police came eventually to stop it.
I learned that the working class faces ahead of it a long struggle , and has no friend in ACAB.
Im not entirely sure this specific issue has much to do with Synthetic CDOs.
Synthic CDOs were just one example of the problem we didn't learn. There's a whole logic, risk and visibility problem around derivatives of derivatives. The fact that the CFTC has suspended swap reporting, and that we have a derivatives markets that is so massive and then we have derivatives (like swaps) based on those derivatives is a system designed to fail.
The derivatives market is over $1 quadrillion dollars large.
Yup, this site has a really interesting graph if anyone is interested.
Though it states 12.4 trillion or 600 trillion depending on valuation type.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-of-the-worlds-money-and-markets-in-one-visualization-2022/
Probably not too much but a key lesson was that the housing market is pretty fucked up
Not talking about the housing market here, talking about the Real Estate market, which the housing market is certainly a subset of, but not what is going to be as big of a player in this issue.
The issue at hand in this case are massive, but vacant, skyrise business focused buildings. And of course the countless giant concrete cubes all over the place in every major city that used to house hundreds of employees and now largely... dont need to. At least not as many, and now 1 of those cubes could be plenty to house several entire businesses, instead of 1.
Hell a company I used to work at was in a giant building and even though it was growing, it was only using maybe 1/5th of its total rooms. Half the hallways were completely vacant and you could walk down rows and rows and rows of dark closed off rooms with just a table and chair in them, lights out.
And that was before the pandemic, post pandemic the entire building had like 3 people in it for a long while, and even when some people filtered back it largely stayed a ghost town. I dunno if they cut their losses and moved to a much much cheaper option to save tonnes of money (I hope they did, it would be a smart choice), but last I saw the place was super empty.
And when this happens, suddenly the property values of an uncountable amount of real estate will plummet. And a LOT of people have a LOT of money banked on that not happening.
Big companies are owned by capitalists who also own considerable assets in real property.
That's a conspiracy theory. Most companies have no interest in keeping high housing market prices, because it increases the wages they pay to their workers and it increases the lease for their offices.
I have not seen any evidence of a ceo needing the office market to stay high. Some companies renting those building? Sure! But most ceo don't care about those.
Managers though can't adapt to remote working teams, and they must justify their use to the company. A ceo will also be very easy to convince that people won't work if they're left alone at home, eventhough all studies prove the opposite. There is a toxic culture within the management and directors that workers won't work if they aren't under a leash.